Hello fellow geoggers! In ‘money makes the world go ’round…’ I mentioned that that one of the topics that I’m currently studying is development and inequalities, and recently one question keeps coming up; is the development gap widening or narrowing? To be able to shed any light on this debate, we first need to have a basic understanding of what the development gap is. The development gap is the divide between rich and poor, or ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. This exists at several levels. The ‘haves’, at a global scale represent the richest 20% of people, who consume around 80% of all resources. The global ‘have nots’ are the poorest 20% of people who earn only 1.3% of global income.

This map shows what we refer to as the North-South Divide, however as the map shows it isn’t just a simple horizontal line across the world (I.e. hemisphere), instead it…